TI3 ticket sale, what went wrong?

As many others I was really bummed out when I was not able to get my hand on a ticket for The International 3. This blog is some of my views on what went wrong and what can go better for the next International ticket sale. It is also simply a way for me to get some of my frustration out there and then move on.

We where 7 friends planning on going to The International this year. 30 minutes before the tickets went on sale we got ready, filled up our Steam wallet to get tickets and simply talked about how awesome it was gonna be. Everyone had heard with work for the opportunity to get vacation the week TI3 was being held and was gonna order plane tickets and hotell the next day.

3, 2, 1! Tickets is available! Or wait... Shop is still closed, error messages start popping up, timeouts happens. "Okay, okay. Just give Steam som time and they will open the shop, we are still ready, plenty of time." So finally the shop is open. We try to get our ticket. Some try on dota2.com, some do it ingame. On dota2.com everyone gets logged out everytime we log in, and ingame the cart is empty even though we click the ticket. "OH MY GOD! I GOT ONE! I JUST CLICKED CHECKOUT AND IT'S PROCESSING!" No one, had gotten this far when this was shouted out. All of us only had gotten empty carts and error messages up until this point. "Bah, nevermind. All I got now is a blank screen ingame..."

All in all, this ticket sale was purely based on luck who got the tickets it seems. I see some people have suggested a lottery for next years International tickets. I feel like this year's ticket ale already was a lottery, a lottery whit a lot of frustration to it.

I have been in queues for a lot of popular concerts/festivals. Even though those sites also gets timeouts and error messages I like their system a lot more. When you are finally able to click a ticket, put it into your cart they are there for around 15 minutes. You then have 15 minutes to fullfill your order or they get pushed back into the ticket pool. This way you know when you have a ticket or not. 15 minutes generally is enough time to have some more error messages, but still be blae to pay in time. With the International tickets noone knew when they actually had a ticket. Most of the time I pressed "Add to cart" on the ticket, but when I got to the cart page ingame, the cart was still empty. And when I finally got it into the cart I only got a blank screen when I had pressed checkout. I would like to see a similar system next year, so I at least know if I have reserved a ticket or not. This year I just felt frustrated. "Do I have one or not? I guess not..."

It was clear that Valve had underestimated the pressure their shop would be under during this sale. Few tickets, fairly cheap tickets and a LOT of people wanting to get one. I had hoped they would see this coming and added more servers for this day, but even if they had it was not enough. I have no idea how many servers Valve got or how easy it is to scale the number, but I hope they at least consider having scalable number of servers for next year's ticket sale in order to cope with the pressure.

As soon as some people had gotten tickets it was clear that some of them only bought them to sell them for a higher price. Of course this is bad, but this will always happen with popular events, concerts, sports, festival, The International. However, this time they were being sold with Valves own market. I like the market in itself, but in this case the Tickets should not have been marketable. As many I was planning on going with other people so we where planning on bying 2-3 if we got through, so I don't like the idea of only allowing 1 ticket per account, but letting people sell the tickets on the market for a higher price is giving the people wanting to sell at the black market a free place to do so. Tradable, yes, be allowed to sell on the market in Steam, no. I know that the people buying to sell for a higher price still woulod have been able to do so, but now they also had a place to do so. Let them at least struggle a little, and not make it so obvious...

All in all, shit happens. There where few tickets avaiable. I hope they consider getting a bigger venue next year. If not I hope I have some more luck in the lottery next year, if it's a frustrating one like this year or an arranged one or any other way Valve choses to do it. I just hope that they have learned from it and see what a huge fan base they actually have. There is a lot of people wanting to se DOTA 2 live. And I guess that's a good thing! For the rest of us we'll have to keep our eyes open or settle down with watching The International 3 online, with the Compenidum or not.

Blizzcon is kinda similar from what I hear, and yeah I wish they did things a different way. unfortunately it's kinda hard to do things in a way that's 100% fair to everyone. why not just buy the tickets at a higher price from someone? it sucks to support those people, but unless I'm really misinformed, it should be a relatively small amount of money compared to the cost of the rest of the trip. either way, goodluck! I went to a few live sc2 events with friends and had a blast!

I totally agree with you. Things like this will never be 100% fair, unless there is a seat for everyone, which there will never be. I am looking into buying a ticket somehow. What I see when I look around now is that a lot of the people with a ticket it looking for items to trade for it, and not cash. But we'll see how it goes.

For events like these i don't think more servers will cut it, need to go the cloud route to handle that volume of traffic. Seems like they could do some optimization on the software and hardware side as well with whatever their current hosting solution.

I was in the same boat as OP. My complaint really isn't about the amount of seats/tickets (although more would be nice obviously) nor is it about the scalpers. My complaint is that nothing I could do would make me get the tickets because every time I tried the website crashed. I never had a chance.

A lottery or queue system wouldn't bother me. Nor would a "they all sell out in 10 seconds" system. Nor would a "we release 500 a day for a week" system.

However, the "for half an hour you press buy over and over again and our system bugs out or crashes non stop while your frustration grows and grows" system is absolutely rage-inducing.

They should have a queue system that you can enter anytime during the three days leading up to the sale. Every half hour you need to type in a captcha code¨so you can't just AFK.The really hardcore people will be guaranteed tickets and even if you have RL stuff you could at least set an alarm to go off every 30 mins during the night leading up to the sale.

Whenever there are ticket sales issues like this, they should have significantly higher prices, but announce that X% of proceeds will go to charity or something like that so that it doesn't seem like they're just being greedy.

On May 10 2013 11:25 alQahira wrote:Whenever there are ticket sales issues like this, they should have significantly higher prices, but announce that X% of proceeds will go to charity or something like that so that it doesn't seem like they're just being greedy.

On May 10 2013 01:10 CatNzHat wrote:For events like these i don't think more servers will cut it, need to go the cloud route to handle that volume of traffic. Seems like they could do some optimization on the software and hardware side as well with whatever their current hosting solution.

I totally agree with cloud being a very good solution, or at least an alternative, when they know they will have spikes in traffic. Maybe it is possible to put the shop servers in the cloud so they can scale up/down when they know a big increase/decrease in traffic will happen. I am guessing they have good statistics on when their systems are under the higher load so they should be able to scale thereafter.

On May 10 2013 03:21 Sn0_Man wrote:However, the "for half an hour you press buy over and over again and our system bugs out or crashes non stop while your frustration grows and grows" system is absolutely rage-inducing.

This is really the first thing I also want them to fix. If it's being sold out really fast, then I'm okay with it. But the store got so bugged during the sale that I lost count of how many times I added a ticket to my cart and tried to check it out :p

On May 10 2013 05:25 Stenstyren wrote:They should have a queue system that you can enter anytime during the three days leading up to the sale. Every half hour you need to type in a captcha code¨so you can't just AFK.The really hardcore people will be guaranteed tickets and even if you have RL stuff you could at least set an alarm to go off every 30 mins during the night leading up to the sale.

Would work just as physical ticket sales work!

Even though this idea sounds interesting, I know for myself I will never be able to get up every 30 minutes for ~3 nights in a row. And for all of us who are working it is not always you can take a minute or two every 30 minutes to press a button of some sort.